Letters

As a scholastic exercise it is not without interest. But if I may offer my two cents for an objection, how about the idea that God:
a) did not desire to tolerate more than a certain amount of evil in the world at any given moment;
b) understood that humans exercising their free will might well do evil; and hence
c) desired to limit the overall amount of human activity so that the overall evil done by the humans at any given moment would not exceed the tolerable amount?

If so, then making sleep necessary for human life, God reduced the overall amount of human activity at any given moment (if an average person sleeps 6 hours a day, then at any given moment only about 3/4 of world's population are active and hence capable of doing evil).

Of course, the above argument is just as pointless as any attempt to make a positive statement about the transcendent God in human terms (which this God, by His very definition, transcends). If God's absolute benevolence is to be questioned, I would argue not from evil done by humans and tolerated by God (in which context the problem of the free will arises) but by evil done by "natural agency," for which God is presumably directly responsible (earthquakes and volcano eruptions killing masses of people, among them babies presumably not responsible for their actions, etc.). But even such argument involves, implicitly, playing by faulty rules.
Just how faulty these rules are was made clear by Plato in the dialogue Euthyphro. There, when Euthyphro says to Socrates that "the
pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate is the impious," Socrates responds with the question: "Is what is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Although this argument involves the traditional Greek gods rather than the monotheistic God, it is fully valid for the latter as well. If there are some absolute standards of good, to which this God fully confirms, then where are these standards derived from and how can we know they are absolute? If there are no such standards and whatever God favors is good by definition, then saying that God is absolutely good is nothing more than tautology (and it still remains to be known, of course, what exactly God favors).
Absolute standards of good (or of anything else) are, from the human viewpoint, a fiction. Of course, this may be just due to the faultiness of human nature (if one wants to call it that), but we humans have nothing better. So, from the human viewpoint, the assertion of God's absolute benevolence is faulty because it assumes not only the existence of some standards of absolute good but also that we are able to acquire a
knowledge of these standards.

[continued]
Stripped of sophisticated language, the claim of God's benevolence runs somewhat parallel to Euthyphro: "There are things which all (or most) people consider good; God must love them. There are things which all (or most) people consider bad; God must hate them." But whence the confidence that what most (or all) people consider good or bad matches indeed some absoulte standard? And how many such "universally agreed moral standards" are there?
Most people would probably agree that murdering babies is bad, but what about a baby born with a fatal disease that would fill his life with suffering and kill him within a year or two (supposing that the disease is incurable by all scientific standards of the day)? Or what about a baby born into a society that may be resonably expected to raise him to become a murderer of people who had committed no crime? In modern Israel, for example, there are people who do not think that killing Palestinian babies is really bad, since those babies may be reasonably expected to be raised as terrorists, while other people are shocked by the very argument of this kind being made. I do not care who is right (at least in the framework of this discussion), but can there be some absolute standard here? Or is the whole issue just morally neutral? Neither question appears to have a positive answer.
Morality is a human, indeed societal, concern, so it is only to be expected that different moral norms would exist from one society to another and from one individual to another in societies that allow pluralism of opinion on such matters. To involve God in these issues (usually to justify one's own position) serves only to muddle them.

Mr. Tremblay and Mr. Rubin have recently presented a rather interesting objection to my argument against the FWD. The objection consists in saying that God does not want to extend the time period in which we could use FW by eliminating the need to sleep because that might lead to the existence of more moral evil than God is willing to accept. As Mr. Rubin put it:

"God:
a) did not desire to tolerate more than a certain amount of evil in the world at any given moment;
b) understood that humans exercising their free will might well do evil; and hence
c) desired to limit the overall amount of human activity so that the overall evil done by the humans at any given moment would not exceed the tolerable amount."

There are however at least three serious problems with this criticism.

First, the objection (especially as it is formulated by Mr. Tremblay) seems to assume that God has middle knowledge. In other words, it claims that God knows how people would behave in the interval in which they now sleep. But whether God has middle knowledge is the subject of an ongoing debate in the philosophy of religion. Thus, the objection depends on a dubious assumption, fact that considerably weakens it.

Second, why should we think that if during the interval in which we now sleep we would have used our FW, the evil in the world would have been greater? One can easily imagine possibilities where the fact that we could stay awake all day without any loses would lead to clear advantages. Scientists, being capable of working more hours a day could had found cures much earlier than they did and so many people who otherwise died could had been saved. People could had got two or more jobs. That could had lead to an increased income and so to better financial conditions for them and their families etc. Not only these possible situations would not lead to increased evil, but in fact would eliminate much suffering, a fact which God wants very much.
These possibilities "neutralize" the one expressed by my two critics. Thus, we should remain neutral on the issue of how people would behave in the 5-8 hours in which they now sleep which amounts to saying that we should ignore this objection. We simply do not know if the objection is correct or not and so it should be disregarded until its claim is better supported.

Finally, it is unclear where the limit of an acceptable quantity of moral evil would be. There were in history people, like Stalin, who caused tremendous evil: the death and suffering of millions of human beings. Apparently, God thinks this quantity is acceptable. Why should we/He think that if Stalin had caused the death of an additional 5.000 people if he had never slept, that would transgress the limit of acceptable moral evil? Until such questions receive an answer, the objection to my argument against FWD is ad hoc.